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Custom Mold & Design’s manufacturing and design capabilities make it a preferred partner to its customers. By Jim Harris

Custom Mold & Design is committed to providing its customers with the highest-quality molds and machined components. For the Forest Lake, Minn.-based company, this commitment begins long before starting the fabrication process. “We are second to none in our ability to provide design for manufacturability assistance,” Vice President of Sales Thomas Caron says. “We design tooling where manufacturability and performance are of paramount importance. From the machined component side of things, we work with our customers to provide optimized part design support in an effort to reduce the costs to produce and increase part performance.”

The company is frequently involved in designing customer molds when the part is still at the “napkin-sketch level,” Early design involvement is where the most money can be saved. “We are experts in building molds that perform well, because we control all of the technologies used to produce them,” he adds. “Technologically, we are a very vertically integrated company.”

When buying a new piece of manufacturing equipment from a distributor, the salesperson may know the technical ins and outs of the machine, but they’ve never used it day in and day out like the customer will. They often don’t fully grasp what it is like to work with that machine over the course of an entire shift. The fact that as a distributor Alliance uses the lasers it markets in its own shop giving it a higher level of understanding and credibility when it comes to end user needs.

Instead of talking with a salesperson with a clipboard checklist, customers can work with a company that has real-world experience and can help them find the right laser for their applications. “We can relate to the customer and make accurate decisions based on what they need,” Sales and Marketing Specialist Tony Demakis says. “Our goal is for our customers to succeed and to have the technology we provide them meet all their goals.”

Like its owner, Global Metal Finishing is driven to always pursue the next level of quality standards.

By Tim O’Connor

Success is often about being in the right place at the right time. For Tamea Franco, one night in the early 1990s changed the entire trajectory of her career.

Operation Desert Storm had just begun when representatives from defense contractor ITT Corp. showed up at Franco’s anodized aluminum shop, East West DyeCom. They wanted to know whether Franco could anodize a casting for a shipment of night vision goggles, a process that would insulate the surface of the goggles and protect them from electrical interference. The ITT reps showed up around 5 p.m. and needed the casting back by 10 p.m. to make their next shipment to troops in the Middle East.

Time is important, particularly in the manufacturing industry. Companies regularly evaluate what work they need to prioritize first, and LillyWorkscan help them eliminate the guesswork in doing that with its Protected Flow Manufacturing software.

“It’s addressing a major pain,” Mark Lilly declares. “North American companies continue to struggle with delivering to their customers on time.”

It’s a problem that’s been going on since the days of Odysseus. When a ship is still in the water, it’s bound to attract some unwanted riders. But now coating manufacturer LiquiGuard has a patent-pending innovation that protects vessels from barnacles, zebra mussels and other bio-fouling organisms, with a durability that exceeds other current solutions.

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